Give me a history lesson - LoS/Old school/Uber people

[Susvain]

After recently going through all of the archives on LoS website i realize how much i love old EQ. i love hearing about all the oldschool raids and what went on in old EQ. I'd love to hear about what world-firsts LoS had and the server firsts. Any oldschool stories and big drama events....whatever...i love all that stuff.

I cant find any lists on the world firsts for all servers for boss mobs or epics or anything. i want to hear about that stuff. i was 12-13 years old raiding in Brothers of Darkness (2001-03ish) and always thought the uber people in LoS, Crimson Tempest etc etc were the coolest people ever.

i didnt know LoS was one of the top guilds in the world when i played...please ..someone tell me the origins and the early raids and the big accomplishments from way back when.

[Susvain]

Arlos talking about the early attempts into PoSky on another thread...i love that stuff

[Tikker]

.

[Tossica]

Wow, didn't realize you were that young back then.

[Arlos]

LoS pretty much got all of the server firsts from initial release (including Nagy, Vox, PoFear, PoHate) until POP, when Remedy got a couple because of their time zone advantage allowed for keeping a necessary advancement mob killed. We overtook them pretty rapidly again, though, and were first at everything into Plane of Time. Someone else will have to answer about GoD and later, because that's when I left.

As for server-wide firsts, LOS had a number of first-ever kills in PoSky, both early on and then later once Kunark hit. We would have been the first guild to clear the entire zone if not for lacking the batphone to let us know you needed to tell Sirran the Lunatic "llaw eht htiw eno ma I" on the next to last island before he'd open the portal to the last one. So, FOH got the first complete clear. We were the first guild on a live server to complete any of the sky quest haste items, though, when we finished the monk haste belt that I got.

In Kunark, we got slowed down by our server being buggy, and constantly crashing Old Sebilis every time we tried to kill Trakanon. We finally got SOE to watch us as we did the fight, they found a hardware issue as a result, and shortly thereafter we killed him, by using a strat of dividing the raid into 2 halves, so there were never more than 30 people fighting him at once. Despite that snafu putting us way behind, we were the 3rd guild serverwide to kill the end boss of Veeshan's Peak, Phara Dar. (behind only Afterlife and FOH) My favorite drama episode from that era: The 3-guild Reet Room argument. 3 entire guild raids packed into the Reet room while leadership from each argued back and forth over who got to fight Trak. Glubgawd ends up getting tired of waiting, and pulls Trak all the way to the Reet room. First warning we had was when he breathed on all of us. Obviously, that resulted in > 150 people dying at once. LOS was by far the first to recover and ready up, so we went and killed him.

In Velious, we were a little slow on some kills because we were trying to stay on pro-dragon faction. We still easily had all of the server firsts, though. The closest anyone got was Sanctuary, who had been working on Yelinak for some time, had started to get closer to getting him. So, we decided there was no way we'd let THAT happen, so we took a night off of dragon faction, went up there, and dropped him in 1 evening's work, then went back to working on the AOW, Sleeper's Tomb, and the TOV Halls of Testing. We got a lot of serverwide firsts in Halls of Testing TOV, as we were the only major guild to be on dragon faction, so we completed almost all of the items first. The biggest serverwide first was the AOW, of course. We got him MONTHS before the next expansion, when no one else was even dropping his health to 90%. It was so unexpected even to SOE, that all of the equipment was just using completely default textures, if they had any at all. Then, SOE nerfed how we did the kill, and the AOW went unkilled for quite some time. Shortly thereafter, they also nerfed the drop rate of quest parts in Halls of Testing TOV, so we said fuck staying on dragon faction, and started into North TOV. Again, despite our late start in there compared to other servers, we were the 3rd guild serverwide to kill Vulak. (who really was a complete tank & spank pussy, Vyemm was the hard one.) Then, the last night before Luclin hit, FOH killed the AOW with PC tanking. They came to our server prepared to talk massive smack about it, only to find we were already fighting him, and dropped him the same way within 15 minutes of their kill. We were the only two guilds to get him pre-Luclin.

Luclin, we weren't quite as up there with the top guilds serverwide, for a number of reasons. (including losing Tigole to Blizzard) We still got all the server firsts, though. We were very very close to being the 3rd guild to kill the Emperor, when SOE completely changed the encounter. It forced our healers to COMPLETELY change how they played the game, and it took us quite some time to get it all down. We progressed through Vex Thal pretty rapidly, largely because we were quick to give up on trying to clear our way through, and started doing mass death runs, with monks pulling cleric & magician corpses from one boss to the next while everyone else ran along to provide interference. Then we'd feign at the door, wait for all the mobs to go home, rez the clerics/magicians with Vox sticks, and assemble there. There was also the amusing event when SOE found we had been using the Dain pull strategies to pull mini-Aten through the roof of the Goo room down to us there, and they banned the guild leadership, before massive community pressure (and an advocate from the inside) got them to rescind the bans after only a couple days.

POP had such a weird sequencing, I honestly don't remember where we were serverwide in finishing PoTime. Also, there was an artificial bottleneck there because the Rathe Council was completely unkillable for a long time, so lots fo guilds were stalled at the same spot in advancement.


Some of the most notable drama incidents between guilds on the server happened in Velious. There was the Klandicar incident, when "somehow" one of the roaming dragons "roamed" on top of Sanctuary as they were trying to kill Klandicar, and while LOS was running to him. Mass wipe ensued, Ixnay frothed at the mouth a lot, no one could definitively prove anything at the time, and LOS ended up killing Klandicar. A week or two later, while LOS was in the middle of a Dain fight, Fell and some other Sanctuary leaders deliberately started and lost the Ring 10 war event so that the Dain (and everything else in the zone) would despawn. This attempt at retaliation backfired badly, as it ended up making LOS laugh our asses off, and made Sanctuary lose half their members and effectively fold up shop.

One of the best early drama incidents again involved Fell, Sanctuary and LOS. The "bass fishing" incident. At this point, LOS's original leader and founder, Draed, had quit EQ entirely and was no longer playing. (hadn't been for a couple months.) Then, on the NT of the time, Llod, a LOS member, posted that Goldlilly, Fell's RL wife, "Gave good head but bad anal." Fell went berserk. He tried to get current LOS leadership to kick Llod out or something similar, and was effectively told to go piss up a rope. Then, he went COMPLETELY off the deep end. He somehow tracks down Draed's RL phone number, calls him, threatens him with real bodily harm, and apparently to make the threat sound more ominous as he knows something about Draed's RL, "I know you like bass fishing...."

Anyway, that's a very brief rundown of notable raid events and drama events. I am sure other people can fill in more detail.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

I loved EQ too, but there was a lot of nepotism which is being missed. LoS' leadership consisted of many people who are and were at Blizzard. These people also were friends with Brad McQuaid who was the lead designer and others at SOE/989. They were able to chat directly with Brad. Hideaki who was the server GM bitched about them to us, about their connections and ability to get management to make him do things. Take it as you will. Another server's big guild FoH had Mcquaid as a member and certainly had a lot of inside info. The biggest advantage early on was knowing when the servers were coming down and being able to rush to content. Guilds that missed it had to wait for the random respawns which were a pain. The random respawns were a big reason why Remedy which was a Euro guild did so well later on.

Fell was slightly nuts, but many of the LoS people were real nasty pieces of work personally attacking people and being very antagonistic. There was a good deal of psychological warfare going on there, and LoS leaders were very good at the server and board politics. This board was renowned for the infighting. It also had more bullshit and lies than a used car dealership. Unfortunately, none of LoS' early leadership, Ariel, Tigole, Draed, etc post here anymore so you won't get their perspective which is too bad.

EQ's big problem was a few guilds could really shut down content early on. It sucked to gear up people to have them cherrypicked by another guild which somewhat made the cycle of competition out of whack. Expansions came out so fast that the gap between guilds was pretty wide early on. It was more weighted towards hard core players and time and organization were much bigger factors in EQ than in any later MMO.

It's also why Everquest lost so many people later on, to games that didn't have the cockblocking and insider click bullshit going on. The funny thing is everything about the game that made LoS, Afterlife, and FoH so singular on their servers was deliberately removed from WoW, which was designed from the LoS leaders and Tigole whom they hired, as well as the guild leader of FoH.

I had fun in EQ, but man I wasted way too much time and I'm quite happy being a dirty casual now. Things like this did seem important at the time, but really weren't. Regardless, it was good to do this with zero external information and from our strats alone early on in Kunark. That's something you won't see in any new MMO or probably ever again in the gaming world. Doing something only a few guilds in the world could do. We might have been the only guild in the world at the time who did it with their guild leader not knowing Brad Mcquaid, too.



I left after Luclin with Ganzo and a bunch of others and went to Percival DAOC. I wasn't around for POP or any of the later stuff so my info above was from 1999-2001/2 solely. I actually loved DAOC's Frontiers far more than raiding in EQ, but the early magic from the latter game was something special. Our guild may not have done a lot of world firsts, but we did rescue literally thousands of TWs from Fear. That's gotta count for something!

[Arlos]

Just to be clear, we actually had no batphone at all later on for anything resembling strats. I can't speak to pre-Kunark, (and yes, there was the famous incident of a nodrop item getting moved from Polo to Ariel), but I can guarantee we weren't getting insider info later on. Our only SOE "insider" was actually someone who was a coder for EQ2, who has since gone on to work on DC Heroes Online. If we'd actually HAD a batphone, we wouldn't have gotten stuck in sky because of not knowing the Sirran phrase, just for one example.

I won't deny that LOS had a rather sizeable collection of.... "Special" people, but Fell was just beyond the pale. Calling Draed in RL, threatening bodily harm to him and his parents, and "I know you like Bass Fishing," LONG after Draed had quit, and all over a message board post? Uhhhhh... Ixnay was another one who was completely insane, between his boasting about his 180k job, to his multiple completely frothing at the mouth meltdowns over in-game drama or the priest BOTB, to his cybering and telling that one girl "I can see your soul..." which lead to the all-time top-5 classic drama thread in NT, "Fuck men, and fuck Ixnay too."

Anyway, you guys should have seen some of the internal drama in LOS all through that era, it made a lot of the drama here look completely tame by comparison. Ahhh, the glories of "Fuck Fungi Tunic," and "Where is Fair and Justice?". Plus other drama classics, like Brionca the complete raving lunatic, who cut his kid's 4th birthday party short by hours so he could make a raid, then dramaquit the guild when he didn't get a piece of loot. (only to make a new character elsewhere called, I shit you not, "Cherrymint",) to Surreal pretending not to be a mangina before stealing and ebaying all of Galiaan's equipment, etc. The thing is, LOS operated on what I like to call "The Older Brother Principle," where an older brother may pick on his younger brother all the time, but will immediately turn around and kick the crap out of anyone outside the family who tries the same stuff. Internally, LOS members would yell and scream and bitch at each other to no end all the time. But, in any conflict with someone OUTSIDE the guild? It was LOS-first above any other consideration. If you weren't in LOS, your opinion didn't matter a fart in a hurricane to the guild, and even if we couldn't stand a fellow guildmate, we'd back him to the hilt against someone from the outside.

Ultimately, LOS had the single largest collection of incredibly highly skilled players I have ever been a part of in any MMO, ever. (Just many of them had egos even more impressive than their playskill.) We frequently did bosses with half the numbers that others used to kill them, and did it in half the time. We also were the hardest of the hardcore, too. It wasn't unusual for us to assemble for a raid at 3-4pm PST, and get done at 3-4 am, 12 hours later, including dying probably a dozen times before we finally got some new boss down. I've never been around any other online group as willing to suffer death after death, and hour after hour of work to accomplish our raiding goals as I found in LOS, and it really spoiled me for any later guild I was in. (even Afterlife, by the time I joined them in WOW.) The only reason the guild worked at all is because we had some of the finest guild leaders I've ever seen, and the best of ALL of them was Tigole. (Ariel was really, really, really good, but Tigole was amazing.)

-Arlos

[Zanchief]

I think I might have been at that trak raid.

Everyone who was playing at that level was crazy, it's the game that made us like that. You devote 40+ hours a week to something it makes it more important than it should. Some good times, some I'd rather forget. Can't believe I'm still posting on this board.

[brinstar]

outside perspective

funny thing is, i never even really SAW too many members of LOS/remedy/sanc/etc - they were always off in some crazy zone i never got to see rather than slumming around with the rest of us. i played that game waaaaayyy too much, but while i might have had the skill for it, i never had the drive to climb to the top. instead i spent all my time running around with my fun keystone-kops type casual guild (in which i was easily one of the most "hardcore" members). we got some stuff killed, even though we were usually 2-3 expansions behind, but it wasn't really even about that. i had way more fun crawling HS with a group or two of cool guildmates.

i am glad i was on the nameless though, because IDGAF about FOH or AL, we had the best guilds in the game. (plus it was always a riot telling people in WoW about all the NPCs named after LOS people and boasting about having seen their EQ toons in-game and telling them "yeah one time i made a lvl 1 halfling and sent tigole a /t AND HE PUT IT ON THE PAGE")

[Lyion]

If you want to go real old school, Before you were in LOS back when there were just a handful of 50s in Vanilla, Arlos, there were two large guilds: Storm Reavers which was run by Ariel and LoS run by Draed. I was in Storm Reavers which did the server first Hate and Fear raids. Leadership of the two guilds decided to merge the two into one and the SR leadership liked the LoS name better. Barnabuss, who was Morgai the mage back then talked a few others and myself into creating a separate guild since in his opinion the leadership of SR was not hardcore enough, but mainly to help his friend, a Ranger who I can't remember who was a real douchebag and one of the founders of LoS. He's the guy who ninja'ed something at the first Vox kill. Anyways, back in vanilla the server was pretty tight and there was a lot of interchanging of people before things stabilized and the TW flood arrived. Kunark really opened the doors to the craziness. .

Early EQ was really a cool environment. We all knew every 50 the first few months and really knew just about every high level person on the server. There was a lot of help and the nasty competition didn't really start until right before Kunark.

Like Zanchief all the hardcore types spent way too much frickin' time ingame. I have some good memories, but mainly I remember to never be that much of an OCD asshole in my time management again.

Brin, most guilds were very friendly. Remedy and Sanctuary, then subsequently Euphoria helped each other all the time. I can't count the times in Kunark we helped other guilds out. That said, we did have some idiots in Sanctuary. I could write a f book over the what seemed thousands of damn tells I got bitching about our members ninja'ing that stupid turtle.

[brinstar]

sure, i didn't mean to imply your guilds weren't fun and all, i just meant that i gravitated more toward casual guilds even though i was maybe the least casual in the guild. it's a weird position to explain, i guess. on the one hand i liked having cool gear and knowing l33t stratz, so i made a bunch of friends in guilds i could tag along with from time to time (CT for example) - but on the other hand i enjoyed not being tied to such a high-pressure grind. it worked out pretty well because the gear and strats i gleaned from tagalong groups/raids (plus the raid utility of my class) made me very qualified to lead my army of dirty casuals to mediocrity and beyond

[Evermore]

lol Emp and AoW were some of the best times i had in EQ. AoW cost me a job lol!

[Arlos]

LOS was willing to work with guilds we liked too, when it was necessary. There's no way in hell we'd have killed the AOW when we did without the assistance of Shock of Swords.

Some notable images:

1) Ixnay melting down at the Cleric BOTB:


2) First post of our AOW progress: http://www.legacyofsteel.net/Archives/Post/2001-07-19 You wouldn't BELIEVE how many people we had logging in and asking us, "How in hell did you get him that low?" and that was barely half. Seriously, no one else was even getting him below 95%.

3) The world first AOW kill, almost exactly 11 years ago today: http://www.legacyofsteel.net/Archives/Post/2001-07-27

4) 2nd AOW kill a few days later, where Monq and I got "The Pants." http://www.legacyofsteel.net/Archives/Post/2001-08-02


One of the funniest times we had when we were learning the AOW fight was when we were wiping, and some jackass was giving us grief, so "somehow" the AOW got trained to him. Of course, at that point the AOW went crazy and started training all over the place. Hearing screams of, "WHY IS THE AOW AT THE BANK!!!!" and similar such did make us laugh hysterically.

-Arlos

Oh, and back out of retirement after many long years, my old sig file, courtesy of Dada's photoshop skills:

[brinstar]

dada sigs best sigs

[Harrison]

Best post ever

I wish I had the foresight to save all of my screenshots from the nameless. The first MGB in EC from manalope, Mudcrush's absurd roleplaying, rage OOC's before channels during raids, etc.

[Tossica]

Even though I never wore the tags, I had the pleasure of raiding with all of the major guilds. I guess I was sort of a mercenary. Had some great times with LoS, Sanctuary, Remedy, Shock of Swords, etc.

[Mudcrush Durtfeet]

I was a founding member of LoS and active until the end of GoD (last original member to leave). It never seemed to me that we had special info from the batphone about how to beat stuff. We certainly beat our head against the wall enough times trying to kill stuff.
Stuff like how to make Seru Bane and I am one with the wall was not known to us, for instance.

That asshole early ranger that was mentioned sounds like Caswallawn or something like that. He was Draed's boss in RL I think, which is how he got in. One of my fond early memories was when we had a rule that anyone could veto a new member. I kept Brionca out for some time until finally the guild leader (Ariel) politely asked me to rescind my veto (which I did). He didn't threaten me or try to bribe me, was just polite. One of the nicest people in the guild actually.

[Mudcrush Durtfeet]

I laughed my ass off when half of Sanctuary deguilded after the Dain incident. Fell was certainly a tool.

[Ganzo]

I laughed my ass off when half of Sanctuary deguilded after the Dain incident. Fell was certainly a tool.

I think that's when I left, but I don't remember what the whole thing was about anymore. I think by that point I was fed up with us being the training ground for LoS recruits. People would join, get geared and get recruited to join LoS, so we'd never have a solid core to take on big things. I was also really fed up by then with people not willing to put in work on hard fights, we'd try 5-6 times and call it a day when few more pushes would have been enough to finish.

Also give Fell a break, he was a good guy to his guild and fun guy to play with. So some kid posted shit about his wife and she probably flipped, so he had to do some shit to avoid nagging. Anyone who's married would have done same shit to avoid his wive's bitching for a next month.

[Lyion]

I'm still amazed at the amount of time I sunk into EQ for those few years. I don't miss the drama, but I miss hanging out with Hazakiah, Beorge, Tannon, Ginzburgh, Quee, Ganzo and others and doing the dungeon crawls or breaking Fear or Hate with one group of people who really could kick ass. My biggest issues weren't with LoS but were actually with Impi, Cynay and Blessing which is a totally different tangent.. Oi Vey...

Fell generally was gracious and was always guild first. He was a very good enchanter, always deferred loot, and had good organizational skills. He was super weird protective of his wife, Goldlily, though. He might have just snapped from getting tons of super nasty tells and dealing with a lot of personal attacks and other things too often given the way some acted towards us. Personal attacks Los' leadership had no problems with, I might add. We took things way too seriously back then. It's hard not to when you're putting 40 to 60 hours a week into a game. I do know it was a lot easier running Euphoria, but that was due to server pops being more mature and actually being able to get rid of dickheads, something we were reticent to do in Sanctuary due to actually needing the bodies to raid.

I liked most of the people in LoS. Heck, half of them were guilded with me in Storm Reavers or Sanctuary. I chatted with Draed often and he was always polite to me and actually helped me out. That said there were a lot of jerks. I certainly don't miss the stupid guild drama and and trying to piece together raids against a hardcore machine of a guild with twice the active people, many whom I had spent a lot of time personally gearing up. Two boxing a cleric and shaman on 3 hours of sleep while ones guild of mostly part timers complained incessantly that we were going to lose a spawn was an experience I'm ready to forget.

I'm glad I left EQ when I did in 2002 after SoL. DAOC with it's Frontiers was a far superior game design before they killed it by trying to make it EQish. WOW was an even better game. I never played POP or anything after, really, so I have no clue what happened on the server past Luclin.

[Zanchief]

I laughed my ass off when half of Sanctuary deguilded after the Dain incident. Fell was certainly a tool.

I think that's when I left, but I don't remember what the whole thing was about anymore. I think by that point I was fed up with us being the training ground for LoS recruits. People would join, get geared and get recruited to join LoS, so we'd never have a solid core to take on big things. I was also really fed up by then with people not willing to put in work on hard fights, we'd try 5-6 times and call it a day when few more pushes would have been enough to finish.

Pretty much this exactly. It wasn't even Fell that did anything in that raid it was some Troll warrior can't remember his name (others will). Who cares, look up Arlos' posts and you'll see tons of shit LoS did that he's laughing off as good times, but when Sanctuary get's it's hands dirty it's cry me a river time. That was always the case with LoS and Sanctuary because there was so much bad blood.

I was in the guild during the Dain fiasco and was actually at that raid. It was a very frustrating time, because the guild was spinning it's wheels for a long time before and was getting all it's players poached to LoS so we couldn't ever get ahead. Combine that with some very immature posting wars with LoS on NT and it became too much. People who left never did so because of that Dain raid, if they said that, it was an excuse. I remember Bzul (i think that was his name, another troll warrior) and Ariella both left at that time and that was pretty much the end for us. We limped on for a while, but we just couldn't take the people leaving. I remember we basically had a new recruit human warrior as our main tank and made such an effort to gear him up (Dageonis or something like that) and he left a month later.

[Ganzo]

I remember Bzul (i think that was his name, another troll warrior) and Ariella both left

I remember spending month's gearing both of them and training Bzul to become MT for the guild, than he gets invited to AoW raid by LoS and few weeks later he's a MT for LoS.

[Lyion]

Yeah, guild turnover and the time required were probably the main reasons I was burnt out. It's interesting if you look at the LoS screenshots and 1/3 of their raid were geared by us, Ganzo, and 1/2 their clerics were from Sanctuary...

Too bad EQ didn't do 10 man raids...

[brinstar]

the poaching problem you folks are describing is not unique to the top-tier btw; that shit happened in the minor leagues too. those who'd rise to the top of my goofball guild and get epic'd would almost invariably get snapped up by Valorguard (or if they were really good, CT). i myself had a couple of ins to CT that i maybe could've utilized, but as i mentioned above i never had the drive to push myself any further into hardcoreville so i just stuck with bothering globin in /ooc.

it was the same exact deal as Sanct -> LoS, only on a smaller scale - we gear someone up, they leave for VG, raiding becomes harder without them. those left behind get frustrated at lack of progress and start sniffing around VG as well. rinse and repeat, vicious cycle.

not that i give half a shit anymore (unlike zanchief, apparently?)

[Zanchief]

I could not give a shit less. I have very little allegiance to Sanctuary as I was a very small cog in the long run. Just pointing out how it was, as that seems to be the point of the thread. i was there at Sanctuary's weakest point, and I know how frustrating it was.